In my continuing effort to spur consumption of oats and save the world, I present you with the recipe for Birds and Bees Power Bars. This is a recipe that I developed for the North Hartford Community Kitchen for the week when we did “Cooking With Kids”. I was trying to come up with a sweet snack that was relatively nutrient dense and didn’t break the bank. It’s got a glycemic load of 11, an excellent omega 3 to omega 6 ratio and is packed with minerals. Not bad for a chocolate bar.

1. Pre-Heat oven to 350 degrees.2. Toast Oats, Sunflower Seeds, Pumpkin Seeds, Walnuts and Coconut in oven for 5 minutes.3. In a sauce pan, simmer Peanut Butter, Honey, Molasses and Butter for 5 minutes.4. Combine and mix dry ingredients except for Chocolate. Divide into two mixing bowls.5. Combine the wet and dry mixtures in a bowl and mix. If mixing by hand, divide Peanut Butter
mixture between the two bowls and mix well. Combine the mixtures and finish mixing.6. Press into a buttered cookie sheet. You can cover with wax paper and roll with a rolling pin or
just work it with your hands until it’s even and fairly flat.7. Bake for 6 minutes.8. Cover with chocolate chips and bake for 4 minutes.9. Take out of the oven and spread the chocolate evenly.10. Set in refrigerator to set. Cut and serve at room temperature.

On a recent brisk March afternoon, he came to this fishing town on the Amalfi Coast and stood amid rows of homemade pork sausages, some covered in hot pepper flakes, that were strung from the low ceiling of a work space. “What do you put in — do you put in the ear?” he asked Antonio Polverino, the sausage maker.
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“No, not the ear,” answered Mr. Polverino, 64, a retired construction worker with thick hands. “This is all meat, ground meat. The heart, and lungs, too. This you eat dry.”

It is traditions like these that Mr. De Michele worries are slipping away. He put his mission this way: “I wanted to explore memory — how memory-based identity persists, exists, gets lost; to take a snapshot of Italian working-class cooking today.”

Cooking shows like “Master Chef,” which has been replicated in Italy, “take away someone’s awareness, his identity,” he said. He pointed to the coastline.

“Here, a person defines himself through hot oil with garlic and anchovies, and is proud of that,” he said. “ ‘Master Chef’ tells you that that’s no good, that you need to do something cool.”

Mr. De Michele’s research is sponsored in part by the Bologna food association Artusi, named after Pellegrino Artusi, the author of an 1891 cookbook that was one of Italy’s first. He has asked Italians to send in their old family recipes to his blog, Artusi Remix. The end result of his travels will be a book commissioned by the Italian publisher Mondadori. But he is also traveling with a videographer for a possible documentary — and for his trademark performances, which often combine a D.J. set with monologues about food and footage of people talking about food traditions.